Visa and Mastercard are distinctly different from other credit card companies like American Express and Discover Card. When you swipe something on your Visa or Mastercard, you are not actually using cards issued by Visa or Mastercard. The card itself is issued by a bank or financial institution somewhere, and the Visa and Mastercard brands represent networks that the issuing card joins. Anytime you make a purchase, the merchant has to pay a fee to the issuing bank by the end of the day, and the financial institutions have to share this fee with Visa and Mastercard.
Visa was created by Bank of America back in the 1966 to act as a way for banks to collect more from non-check purchases than the rising Mastercard which was an open-loop system created to electronically transfer funds. The important takeaway is that the Visa and Mastercard networks were created to make transactions … Read the rest of this article!